CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++architectureservicethrift
Lazylabs
Lazylabs

Reputation: 1444

Exposing Service to Clients

We have internal services in our application, which are basically developed as Thrift RPC services. Now, I need to expose these services to the client applications, which are outside of the core system.

Now, the question is: should I expose these Thrift services directly to the client? Advantages of doing so would be least amount of work required. Disadvantage would be that the clients need to connect to these Thrift APIs as well as another interface, which already exists, so actually the client applications need to open more than one socket to make connection to the core system.

An alternate option would be to wrap these Thrift services in another layer, which will be ultimately delivered to the end clients. Disadvantage of doing this: doing marshalling/unmarshalling the data twice, once with Thrift and next time with another interface.

What should be the preferred way of handling this situation?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 125

Answers (1)

Shiraz Bhaiji
Shiraz Bhaiji

Reputation: 65391

We would not expose these services directly to outside clients. We would build or use an application to configure a proxy that the external clients could connect to.

The advantages to this are:

  • No need to punch a hole in your firewall
  • Possibility to do an extra security check
  • Possibility to throttle access to the internal service
  • Less chance of a hacker being able to exploit service

Upvotes: 1

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